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7 Ways To Decrease Your Web Page Load Time

According to a research report by the Aberdeen Group, customers are won or lost in literally seconds. The findings revealed that a 1-second delay in page load time yields 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.

Amazon also proved this point by reporting increased revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed. Many more examples could be cited but the point is hopefully clear that web page load time is money, plain and simple.

Which is why businesses and individuals today need to do everything in their power to decrease their web page load time. Remember, time is money – literally down to the microseconds.

Here are 7 hacks you can employ to ensure that your web page load time reduces drastically and your conversions increase proportionally.

How to Increase Website’s Speed

1. Image Optimization

Statistics show that customers tend to abandon a website that hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds. Since images account for most of the downloadable byte space on a web page, your biggest gains to web page download time are going to come from image optimization.

One of the best ways to ensure proper image optimization is to adopt correct sizing and formatting (JPEG, GIF, or PNG). The goal is to reduce the file size as much as possible without sacrificing quality and there are a number of tools on the web that can help with this.

2. Try a CDN

The value of a Content Delivery Network is that it can take static files of a website, like CSS, images, and JavaScript, and deliver them through web servers that are closer to the user’s physical location. Shorter proximity amounts to faster load time.

Some examples of CDNs are AWS Cloudfront, Fastly, or Cloudflare. Another benefit of a CDN is that by offloading the bandwidth you also get less risk of downtime disruptions due to traffic volumes. Every way you look at it a CDN is a win-win for uptime.

3. Caching

Caching is a mechanism for the temporary storage of web pages to reduce bandwidth and improve performance. When a visitor arrives at your site the cached version will be served up unless it has changed since the last cache. This saves server time and makes things altogether faster. Enabling browser caching will make things easier and faster for your repeat visitors.

4. Compression

Gzip is a software application used for file compression, which is like putting your website into a zip file. Most servers and clients today support gzip. When a gzip compatible browser requests a resource the server can compress the response before sending it to the browser. This can significantly reduce time lag and latency in your website.

5. Keep Your Code Light

It’s important to minify your code as much as possible, meaning that you compact your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code base into fewer files to optimize the way they run. For example, if your mobile website has five JavaScript files the browser will make five separate HTTP requests to fetch them. To avoid the block and wait time, an alternative approach would be to minify and concatenate those 5 files into one streamlined one.

6. Review Your Web Hosting

Another simple hack for decreasing website page load time is to check with your hosting provider to see what kind of package you have. A shared hosting account often involves sharing server space with dozens of other companies where website speed is impacted by the number of people using the servers. If this is the case, then it may be time to consider a dedicated plan where you have sole access to the server.

7. Ads Don’t Convert

Also, here’s a newsflash: banner ads are DOA and are only averaging 1 click in 1000. So rather than cluttering your website with ads consider a better use of the real estate.

At the end of the day, the primary point of your website is to improve traffic and make money. The glossy images and trendy web design styles may seem like a big draw initially but they could backfire if your visitors are waiting more than 3 seconds to access your site.

Adopting the 7 hacks above will ensure your website is optimized and running as efficiently as possible while leading to an increase in overall conversions.

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